Extract from Olga V. Mack’s article, “AI Contracts Are Quietly Becoming The Best Product Documentation.”
For years, contracts and product documentation lived in separate worlds. If you wanted to understand how software actually worked, you talked to the product team, read the technical documentation, or sat through a product demo. If you wanted to understand the legal relationship between the parties, you opened the contract.
That division made sense because software itself was relatively predictable. The product documentation explained the features. The contract explained payment terms, warranties, liability, and a handful of legal obligations. Each document served a different purpose, and there was very little overlap between them.
Artificial intelligence is changing that distinction in ways I don’t think we’ve fully appreciated.
In my experience, enterprise AI contracts are becoming some of the most important product documents customers receive.
